The Empire of Shadows

by Richard E. Crabbe

  “An ongwéonwe can walk the sun into the earth,” he used to say. The old man had proven it many times, taking him on hunts for days at a time with hardly anything to sustain them but boiled corn bread. “A man hunts better on an empty stomach,” the old man said.

  Tupper did not walk alone. There was the moon to guide and the spirit of his grandfather for council, but other things were with him too. The voice of the wind in the forest reminded him of his dream on the train. More than once he stopped, hand on the butt of his pistol, listening. In those times the forest seemed to mock him, whispering that his senses were dulled by his time in the city of the white men. He somehow felt it was so, and walked in caution.

  Only once did he see anyone on the road. It was a man in a carriage with a lantern swinging from a pole to light the way. He’d seen the light from far off and hid himself in the forest as the shay passed. Tupper couldn’t make out the man’s features, but a chill went through him when the driver turned his face toward him, as if sensing his presence. Jim stood a long time watching the bobbing lantern fade before following.

  The sky in the west was showing the barest shade of charcoal gray when Indian Lake drew near. Tupper didn’t need to see the town. He could smell it. Even before the dawn the rich spice of wood smoke flowed over the land. He was instantly hungry. Jim had left North Creek with none of the things he needed, deciding to find what he could on the way, rather than risk being remembered in the little town.

  “If you don’t want to be tracked, then don’t walk in the mud,” the familiar voice counseled. The smell of wood smoke grew stronger, so strong in fact that Tupper wondered at it. He came to a dirt track leading off to his right. It was not much more than a converging shadow. The smoke seemed to be coming from that direction, so he veered off the main road and followed the track into the woods as the first gray ghosts of the day appeared between the trees. As he walked the smell of smoke grew stronger.

  “Odiágweot,” he grunted, speaking the old word for “smoke.” Tupper liked to think in the old language, even though few spoke it now. It came more naturally here after lying dormant in the city.

  A mist of smoke lurked in the hollows as if it oozed up from the earth. He stayed well clear of those places but still kept on for a little way, hoping to find a cabin perhaps and an opportunity to take some of the things he needed. He walked like a bobcat on a scent, pausing now and again to sniff the wind and test the dark with narrowed eyes. He found the pistol in his hand but put it back in his pocket and reached into his boot for a more silent weapon before remembering it was gone.

  Tupper turned a bend in the road. In the darkness it looked like a dead end but it wasn’t. The road opened before him, the trees receding on either hand, scattered like a defeated army in full retreat. Before him a vast clearing spread into the distance.

  In the wooly, gray halflight an army of stumps stood in a barren wasteland. Branches lay about in tangled confusion, reaching like gnarled and withered fingers. The mist of smoke was thicker here, flowing about the decaying stumps. Tupper shivered as he stood rooted before the field. Far off on the other side, maybe half a mile or more, there were spots of red glowing within high black piles that he knew to be the bodies of trees. From those piles the smoke oozed spreading across the land. “Charcoal burners!”

  For a long time Tupper stood brooding. The fallen forest, the stumps, the sickly gray cloud of the slowly roasting logs held him in a morbid spell. This was what honióo did, spoiling and burning till nothing was safe, not fin nor fur, bark nor rock itself. The forest would be made to yield, skinned like a beaver, the carcass left to rot.

  This had been Six Nation land, the hunting ground of the Mohawk, the keepers of the eastern door to the Iroquois longhouse. This land had been theirs for as long as the elders had memory. Hodianok’doo Hediohe had given it into their care long before the time of Hiawatha, and the trust had been passed from one generation to the next, unbroken.

  Now, in the span of just a few generations, their land was plundered. The beaver were first, trapped almost to extinction for the fancy hats of the English and French. Their land had been whittled away by trade or treaty or theft. Once the honióo had it, the trees were next, then the iron from the ground and the game from the forests. Gone were the wolf, the moose, and the mountain lion, never to return. Streams and rivers ran brown with mud from logging and river drives. Even the fish were fewer now.

  To those who knew it not, the Adirondacks were pristine. To those few of his race who still walked these woods, it was a bitter husk of what had been. That there was still hope for what remained seemed little consolation. Tupper felt these things more than thought them. They smoldered in his wilderness-wired brain with the sickly scent of singed hair and hide. It was as if some part of him had been burned away, he felt, as he squinted through dampened eyes over the wasteland before him. The low fog of the smoldering logs lapped at his feet as though he smoldered too.

  An hour later Tupper was leaving Indian Lake. The hamlet had yielded what he needed with no more than the flutter of a sleeping eyelash. A clothesline, an open tool shed, a quiet barn, and an unlocked smokehouse were plundered. He had enough to keep him going if he had to take to the woods. He could disappear, drop below the surface of the green sea around him, and not come up for weeks.

  That wasn’t what he wanted, though. His notion about earning enough to buy himself a place had grown. It had driven him to the city to earn more than he ever could in the Adirondacks. But he had been cast back, a fish too foreign and too far from its native pond. Maybe he was meant to stay, and in the staying find his own path. If the long arm of the police did not reach him, he would find that way. That his might be the way of pain did not concern him.

  Eight

  O’er all there hung a shadow and a fear,

  A sense of mystery the spirit daunted.

  —THOMAS HOOD

  “Oh, it’s you,” Bess said, peering out over the barrels of her shotgun through the half-open door.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Put up that damn thing an’ let me in,” Chowder said.

  Bess huffed. “Let me in is it? Not so much as a ‘by your leave’?”

  The door opened and Chowder heard another door slam at the front of the house. “Not disturbing anything, am I, Bessie? Not that I give a shit, mind.”

  Bess looked around. “Nah. Just one o’ the boys. They like ta be scarce when cops’re ’round.”

  Chowder nodded. “Bright young lads they are. Enterprising too,” Chowder said as he stepped into the cluttered hallway. He looked around in the gloom. “Jesus, Bess them boys’ve been busy. They empty out a shop or something?”

  Bess laughed, a low, rumbling deep in her chest. “Nah. Just a rash o’ poor, unfortunate souls sellin’ the last o’ their worldly goods for a crust o’ bread.”

  Chowder grinned. “Sure it was now.”

  There had been a series of fires in the area over the last few months, talk of things going out the back doors while the firemen fought over their hydrants. So far nobody had been killed, but it was only a matter of time before that would happen. Chowder wasn’t particularly opposed to plunder, but arson and people getting themselves burnt up, well that was a touchier thing.

  “I’d advise you to lighten your inventory, Bess. Who knows where some o’ them poor folk got this stuff.” He looked at her like a school-teacher would an undisciplined student.

  “You’d be wise to clear it out before my boys come round.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! You see how much I got ’ere? Take me a month o’ Sundays ta move it all. You get yer cut, what d’you care how it comes to ya.”

  Chowder frowned as he craned to look into the room that opened on the hallway. It was stacked to the ceiling.

  “I like my cut, Bessie. Trouble is, your boys’ve been a bit too ambitious. Just lighten the load is all I’m sayin’. Hey, if I wasn’t a friend, would I be tellin’ you this? No! You’d find my lads breakin’ down that old door o
’ yours an’ haulin’ your fat ass off to the Tombs! So be a good lass an’ tidy up a bit, eh?”

  Bess coughed and brought up a wad of thick phlegm, spitting it on the floor at Chowder’s feet. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and turned a bloodshot eye on Chowder. “Not in the best o’ health at the moment,” she said. “Give me a few days; a week, maybe.”

  “Sure, Bess. Sure. No sense ruining your health. An’ tell them lads o’ yours not ta play with matches, eh?”

  Bess gave Chowder a disgusted frown and a shrug of a shoulder. “So what brings ya here, Chowder? Yer lookin’ for that Injun ain’t ya, the one’s in the papers. C’mon in then,” she said, turning to rumble down the hall. “What’ll ya have, a shot or a beer?”

  Chowder had hoped to get Bess’s aid in finding the escaped Indian, have her send her gang of boys to comb the streets. He’d used them like that many a time before and was always pleased at how quickly they could come back with information. Her gang paid tribute to the Whyos and fenced for them, too. As a result, Fat Bess had a network of gang contacts that spread over the West Side, from Greenwich Street to the waterfront, and from the Battery to Canal Street.

  “I’ll have a beer if you don’t mind, Bessie,” Chowder said as he followed her broad back. In spots she had to turn sideways to fit between the crates and boxes, piles of clothes, bags of rice, and a thousand other things. The old building shook as she went, and dust sifted down from the floor above.

  Chowder wondered when the place would simply collapse. The house had been a substantial residence, once upon a time. Chowder could recall when it was still respectable. But as the well-to-do moved uptown, the place had been sold to a speculator, and rented to prostitutes who could afford to pay the highest rents in the city.

  The place had become a dive, catering to out-of-town merchants and the dock trade. Bess had gotten her start there and had never left. She owned the house now and used its cavernous interior as a warehouse for stolen merchandise. It was a profitable business, relatively risk-free if she paid the cops on time—which she did, and the gangs, which she made doubly sure of.

  “Hear anything about this escaped fella? Busted out of a Black Maria with a bunch of others. Name’s Tupper,” Chowder said to her back. They went into the kitchen, which was surprisingly neat and clean, though great sacks of produce were stacked in one corner.

  “What’s so interestin’ about ’im? Not the first one to escape, I reckon. What’d ’e do?”

  “Gutted a foreman on a site up around Madison Square. Trouble is, this foreman was a Tammany boy, you know, keepin’ tabs on who gets the jobs, pays their share, that sort o’ thing. Got the bosses in an uproar, so they go to the chief, the chief goes to the captains, an’ before you know it we’re all runnin’ about like ducks in a Chinaman’s basement, bouncin’ off the walls for fear o’ the hatchet.”

  He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. It was stifling in the kitchen. Bess kept the windows nailed shut for security. She handed Chowder a bottle of beer. He flipped the porcelain stopper off and took a long pull.

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure. No idea where this Injun is?” Bess said, not looking at Chowder but listening intently. She popped open a beer and took a long gulp, setting her chins quivering.

  “Nothing yet. He’s probably still in the city. No reports of him at any of the terminals or docks,” Chowder said, leaning against a hutch filled with expensive china.

  “What’s ’e worth to ya?” Bess said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

  Chowder gave her a long look. “Kinda depends on who’s asking,” he said. “If it’s you, then we can make all sorts of arrangements. For example, I might be able to keep the captain o’ your precinct from getting too curious about your inventory situation. Or maybe I could talk to a friend or two in the Wigwam and convince them to sell you that warehouse you’ve been wantin’ on Broome Street.”

  Bess’s eyes narrowed. “You could, eh?”

  “Can’t promise for sure, but yeah, I can get that done, I think,” Chowder said.

  “Deal,” Bess said, sticking out the neck of her beer bottle. Chowder clinked his bottle against hers with a curious frown. “So, whadaya know?”

  Bess told Chowder how the Indian had found his way to her the day before, and how he’d changed his appearance and left within an hour. “Paid me for it proper, too,” Bess said.

  Chowder was writing it all down. “Bought a knife, a bayonet, you said, some clothes and ammunition for his pistol? Must be the pistol he stole from the patrolman.”

  “I guess. I didn’t see it. He was real polite for a savage.”

  Chowder chuckled. “Yeah, except when he gutted that foreman. What kind of bayonet did he buy? I don’t get what he’d need a bayonet for.”

  “I got another,” Bess said, pushing off from her rest against a table. “C’mon.” They squeezed their way through the jumbled hall and into a front room that she apparently reserved for weapons and ammunition.

  “Jesus, Bess! You got a fuckin’ arsenal here.”

  She just shrugged and reached into a barrel, pulling out a long blade with a bone handle.

  “Hmm. I’ve seen stuff like this. During the war. Damned wicked weapon,” he said, fingering the sharp spike. “And you say he bought one o’ these?”

  “Yup. Still got his clothes, too.”

  Chowder nearly jumped. “No shit? Lead on, darlin’.” He followed her to the stairs, letting her go up first. He found himself on eye level with her tremendous ass as it shifted and trembled up the darkened stairway. “Don’t tell me,” Chowder said. “Third step, right?” Bess just giggled, rumbled was more like it.

  As Chowder went up he thought about the first time he’d seen Fat Bess. He’d arrested her in one of the periodic crackdowns. Her madam hadn’t been keeping up with her payments. Bess had been in mid-hump, on her hands and knees with a Brooklyn alderman, when Chowder burst into her room.

  Even at sixteen she’d gone well over two hundred. She did have a pretty face back then and a total lack of shame. He remembered how she shook her immense ass at him once the alderman jumped off and asked him if he’d like seconds. In all the years since, the vision of that vast, rounded expanse of white flesh had never left him. And now it seemed to float before him as he clumped up the darkened stairs, a white moon in the benighted house.

  Another hall went back to front through the second floor. There wasn’t quite as much swag clogging this one, but it was cluttered by any standard. Chowder looked in each of the rooms as they went by. They were much like the ones below, jammed to the ceiling with dark masses of things beyond counting.

  They worked their way toward the back of the house, a window at the end of the hallway casting the only light. At the doorway to the third room, a bedroom by the look of it, they stopped. On the floor was a pile of clothes. Even from the doorway Chowder could see they were filthy and stained with dried blood. Long black hair lay in clumps on the floor and on the bureau near a large bowl and pitcher.

  “Haven’t had a chance ta clean up,” Bess said. “Was kinda thinkin’ one o’ you boys might pop by. I know how you like to keep yer evidence fresh and all.”

  Chowder stood for a moment taking this in. Bess pointed to the pile with her shotgun, which she hadn’t put down for a moment. Even when drinking her beer, she’d tucked it into the broad, leather belt she wore about her middle. Chowder bent to examine the clothes.

  “Oh shit, they stink!” he said, pulling his hand back before touching them. He pulled out his daystick and poked through the pile. “Looks like his stuff, from the description I have,” he said. Looking at the pile of hair, he added, “And that’d be about the right length hair, too.”

  “You say he didn’t tell you where he was going?” he asked, turning to look at Bess.

  “Sorry. Just said he was a Mohawk or somethin’ and how ’e had to get outa town.”

  A short while later they went back down the groaning stairs, Bess leadi
ng. Chowder carried the clothes and hair in a sack to bring back to the detective bureau.

  “When am I gonna hear ’bout that warehouse?” Bess asked over her shoulder. “Sure as hell I need a good place to move all this shit. Goddamn house is about to fall down, I got so much in here.” As she said this, one of the steps groaned louder than usual and wood splintered with a shriek. What happened next was so fast Chowder didn’t really know what happened until it was over.

  Bess’s foot had gone through one of the treads, pitching her forward. Her leg, massive though it was, snapped like kindling. Bess’s scream was cut short, though, obliterated by the roar of her shotgun as she crashed down the stairs.

  Chowder, who had reached out to try to catch her from falling, was splattered and at first didn’t understand why he was wet. It was so dark in the stairway it was hard to see the blood.

  Bess lay face down on the stairs, motionless, her leg at an impossible angle. A huge, red hole gaped where her shoulder met her neck. Chowder scrambled down to her, but all he could do was watch as blood fountained from her neck and spilled down the broken stairs.

  It was some hours later before Fat Bess’s body was carried out of the house. Two men from the coroner’s and three roundsmen finally worked her free. She lay on a steel table in the morgue at Bellevue. The lights hanging from the ceiling made her pasty flesh appear almost translucent, except where the blood had pooled down her front.

  “Here, I want you to see this,” the coroner said. Chowder wasn’t all that anxious to get a closer look. Fat Bess was not an appealing sight. He leaned closer anyway.

  “Been tellin’ Bess for years she’d end up this way if she wasn’t careful,” Chowder said with a shake of his head. “Merciful quick though. Always supposed it’d come from one o’ the Whyos, or somesuch, not at her own hand.”